When it comes to recruiting the right students for your school, it is always a challenge trying to sort out those students who would be the right fit from amongst the millions of other college-bound students each year. So let’s see - step-by-step using actual data from the STEM Premier platform - how we can overcome this challenge.

Here’s a hypothetical: you’re a public higher ed institute in the state of Pennsylvania and you’ve just launched a new chemical engineering program. You’ve got the faculty and the facilities. Now you just need the students.

So, let’s start with a bird’s eye view and see what the landscape looks like. Here’s the top college interests of STEM Premier’s entire student population:

Unless we’re a nationally-renowned institution like MIT, this is obviously too broad for our needs. Let’s narrow it down by using STEM Premier's tools. We can use the "search" function to specify that we are looking only for students residing in the state of Pennsylvania. Once we have a list obtained of students who match that criteria, we could either further refine it by adding additional criteria - such as GPA - or go ahead and add the search to our "dashboard," which will give us a comprehensive overview of those Pennsylvania students. Let's add the search to the dashboard and take another look at college interests.

Now we’re getting somewhere. So we can see which schools that Pennsylvania’s students are most interested in, and we can also see where they live.

But what about Pennsylvania students with an interest in chemical engineering? No biggie. Let’s add that career interest to our already existing search criteria, and add that back to our dashboard.

Bingo. Now we’re cooking. At this point, we can see a trove of information about this segmented population, from their college interests to their standardized test scores. From here, we can use this information in multiple ways. We can use the map to identify students from certain towns or locations around the state, we could single out students within this segment for personalized communication, and we could send out a message to all of these students. It’s really all about the unique goals and needs of the organization using STEM Premier.

If you're a college looking for your next incoming class, click here to learn more and get started.